beautiful, funny, sad & true

Well, it finally happened; I and at least ten other people got laid off on Friday.

It wasn’t at all a surprise.  There have been many rounds of layoffs over the last six months, so we lasted quite a bit longer than most.  Two or three months ago, the company was taken over by another, and the new company seems to have decided to simply dismantle much of the original, and send the work elsewhere in the country, leaving us high and dry in the process.

I’m not bummed about this at all.  If anything, it’s a relief not to have to wonder what’s going to happen anymore, and I can put it all behind me and move on toward the future now.  I’m going to go on unemployment, like so many others are right now, and sort out my life while I figure what to do next.  I have a fairly simple and ‘low overhead’ lifestyle, and I also have friends, resources and talents that I haven’t had before.  I also know that it’s possible to survive on extremely meager means–I’ve certainly done that before–so that won’t slow me down much.  I’m not being a Pollyanna about it, either.  I think any of my friends could tell you that I’m good at assessing situations, and that I’m nothing if not a realist.  I think the glass is neither half-empty nor half-full, but that it’s twice as big as it needs to be.

I know; I’m clever.

I’m going to reach out and promote myself more for musical work.  I’m going to ask my friends and colleagues to refer me for producing, recording, mixing, et cetera, and I’ll also be available for playing with more people too.  I’m looking forward to all of this.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, and send me good thoughts throughout this transitional time, and don’t hesitate to ask me about musical endeavors, or refer me to people you think would appreciate my talents.

Thanks!

This whole getting-laid-off thing is going to be a blessing, I can just feel it.

p.s. – Now I’ll have much more time for blogging!

I don’t normally like to do ‘filler’ blog entries, but I’ve been too busy to write. With all apologies for the long time gap between entries, I’m going to have to ask for your prolonged patience. This has been, and continues to be, a very busy week. In a good way.

I’ll be celebrating two birthdays tonight and tomorrow, AND rehearsing with IrishBand. Sunday I’m sleeping in and listening to This American Life, then meeting with a guy who wants me to produce one of his songs, and THEN I’m seeing a movie with a new friend.

I’ll letcha know how it all goes, and hopefully even manage to take a few pictures. It promises to be a great weekend.

Naturally, all of this Mac nostalgia made me think of the comic strip Bloom County, in which the character Oliver Wendell Jones got a computer for Christmas which had a hilarious mind of its own, and which was obviously inspired by the first Macintosh.  It was called the Banana Junior 6000.

You can click on all of these to make them large and legible, by the way.  Here are two strips, from when Oliver first got the computer. . .

. . .and here are two from some time later, when Oliver and the Banana started to feel the effects of Moore’s Law:

This was the 1980’s, after all, so there was plenty of heavy metal music in the culture at large.  Some people listened to it, some people ridiculed it, some of us even got guitars and learned how to play it.  I told you that story so I could tell you that Kiss was one of the biggest bands in the world back then (you could argue that they still are), and one of their claims to fame was definitely Gene Simmons’s tongue.  The creator of Bloom County designed a hilarious mock-advertisement for the Banana, using Gene as the negative model for what will become of your child if he or she doesn’t grow up with the necessary skills and tools to survive in this cruel and unforgiving world.  Like any good, intrepid Kiss fan, I instantly recognized it as a classic, cut it out of the newspaper, and tacked it to the wall in my bedroom.

Still rings true today, eh?

I love the name of the program ‘Bananamanager.’  That’s just pure genius.  Somehow, I suspect that’s where he got the idea for the whole Banana thing in the first place.

Incidentally, I need to give special thanks to this blog and this blog, from which I scrounged up these strips.  Without them, I would have been trying to take pictures of my old Bloom County books, which would have been a huge pain, and wouldn’t have looked nearly as good either.  My hat’s definitely off to both of them.

Apple just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh, and I thought it would be fun to scrounge up the original television ad for it, from 1984.  It’s a classic.

The ad had a bit of a resurgence in 2008, when a parody of it was used for the Obama presidential campaign.

Here’s the first real life introduction of a Macintosh computer, hosted by the ubiquitous Steve Jobs, but the Mac speaks for itself, both figuratively and literally.

Before that, in 1983, there was a super-weird industry event called the “Macintosh Dating Game,” which was emceed by Steve Jobs, and which featured three software CEO’s, two of whom have become historical also-ran’s, but one of whom is someone who you will no doubt recognize.

It’s interesting in hindsight that Apple spent so much time taking pot shots at IBM, when Microsoft was the company they should really have been paying attention to.

There’s so much more I could share about all this.  I find the early days of the personal computer industry endlessly fascinating, because that’s when it was all being born, and I was just the right age to be interested in all of it, and what’s more important for this entry, just the right age to remember and be able to share it these many years later.

Now, as back then, Macs comprise about ten percent of the market, but as Douglas Adams famously said in an ad (which I’ve so far been unable to scrounge up), “They may have only ten percent, but it’s clearly the top ten percent.”  Well said, Douglas, well said.

If you’re so inclined, here’s an interesting collection of articles called 25 Years of Macintosh for you to share and enjoy.

Happy birthday, Mac!

Today was, quite frankly, hellish.

The company at which I work was recently bought and taken over by a (formerly) rival company.  Originally, my company was split into three different ‘brands’.  Today we got word that the company that bought us is planning to close one of those three brands, and that Friday will be the day of reckoning.  This means that quite a few of my friends are going to be on the dole.

For a while, we thought that they intended to close the entire department that I’m in.  It wouldn’t surprise me if they do that, to be honest, but at least we made it through this round.  For me, the timing would be spectacularly bad, but then again, I don’t suppose there’s ever a really good time to lose a job.

So yeah.  Between thinking I was heading for unemployment, and then finding that no, a bunch of my friends are heading for unemployment, I just feel like I’ve been tied in knots.  It was an emotionally challenging day.

And by the way, I still have something in my eye; the same thing that was in there yesterday, in fact, and it hurts like effing hell.  Someone told me today that a “crazy but good” way to get things out of your eye is to pull your eyelid away from your eye by pulling on your eyelashes, then plug your nose, and then blow.  Yeah, I know.  It didn’t make any sense to me either, but I did give it the old college try, and I’m here to report that it was ineffective.  Apparently, rather than being ‘crazy and good’, it’s just crazy.

Sorry for the long lapse between entries.  I had a super busy and fun weekend, and then an incredibly busy and stressful week so far.  On Sunday night, IrishBand’s drummer came over and we recorded the drum tracks for another song, then I recorded the bass part and worked out a few guitar parts.

Tonight I have rehearsal, and my cohorts will be here pretty soon, but I did want to check in and give you an update.  And now I’m going to eat dinner and shut my eyes for a while until my friends arrive.